Warning to live in 1950's not for wimps

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A-bomb drills, now we know they would have done exactly squat, big deal.
To be fair, depending on the size of the bomb and your distance from it, duck-and-cover could have provided some protection from things knocked loose by the shock waves. Too close, and you're doomed anyway, but hiding under your desk won't make things any worse. Far enough away, and you're safe anyway, but hiding under your desk won't make things any worse. And I'm pretty sure those drills served as the basis for the earthquake drills my schools had a few decades later.

OK...first time this thought occurred to be was one day when she and I were looking out at the front yard. It was spring, dandelions were sprouting all over the place... and she says, " Oh! The dandelions are just dreadful! I wish they never had banned DDT! That stuff actually worked. You didn't have all this mess all over your yard. I'll tell you, back then, you got your money's worth when you bought something. Things did what they were supposed to do!"

She was wrong in any case. DDT wouldn't have done a thing to those dandelions - it's an insecticide, not an herbicide.

Anyway...yeah, Jodel, until about the 70's or so... I nursed mine for 13 months... but that was the 90's... And you know...it was that generation (those who are 80ish now) that really had an issue with my breastfeeding..lol See, I think my generation is so completely differently minded than that one...it's really hard sometimes to even just chat...but I do try. ;-)

Of course breastfeeding also reduces fertility slightly. But then, people were encouraged to *want* to have families of four, five, six children. All closely spaced.

There were still a few only children. But not many. And Teachers and such tended to look down on them and regard them as being “spoiled, of course”. They also tended to look the other way in regards to bullying. After all, the child has no siblings, so it must be “good” for them.

OK...first time this thought occurred to be was one day when she and I were looking out at the front yard. It was spring, dandelions were sprouting all over the place... and she says, " Oh! The dandelions are just dreadful! I wish they never had banned DDT! That stuff actually worked. You didn't have all this mess all over your yard. I'll tell you, back then, you got your money's worth when you bought something. Things did what they were supposed to do!"
She was wrong in any case. DDT wouldn't have done a thing to those dandelions - it's an insecticide, not an herbicide.

hahahaha!! is that right? OMG! That's so funny.

Wow...nobody came back? Weirdness abounds here lately...lol

Anyway...yeah, Jodel, until about the 70's or so... I nursed mine for 13 months... but that was the 90's... And you know...it was that generation (those who are 80ish now) that really had an issue with my breastfeeding..lol See, I think my generation is so completely differently minded than that one...it's really hard sometimes to even just chat...but I do try. ;-)

Of course breastfeeding also reduces fertility slightly. But then, people were encouraged to *want* to have families of four, five, six children. All closely spaced.

There were still a few only children. But not many. And Teachers and such tended to look down on them and regard them as being “spoiled, of course”. They also tended to look the other way in regards to bullying. After all, the child has no siblings, so it must be “good” for them.

Well, I only know... the 50's weren't really anything like "Grease"...LOL

Please don’t ignore sexism either. God help you if you wanted to something with your life besides cleaning the kitchen, popping out kids and turning alcoholic in the suburbs.

Exactly, and it bothers me that so many today look at those days as a model to one day return to.
The 50's - awesome if you were a white male! Not so great if you were anything else.

Honestly, I'm not so sure that it's the '50's that some would like to return to. Or that it's even in this country. Or, maybe, something else entirely.

First, that business with the women-in-binders comment. Odd way to put it, and slightly disturbing taken as a Freudian Slip, since the word "binder" might be taken as implying an association with confinement or restraint.

And a second case in point:

Well, well... tonight on Letterman, Dave and Donald Trump finally made peace over a flap in which Letterman had called Trump a racist. The show-host apologized and withdrew his accusation.

So... now... Trump is *not* a racist ( because he's possibly just smart enough not to play it that way ). Of course, frankly, I don't care... I still detest the man.

Because... even if he "literally" isn't... what he and his political cronies have been up to, for almost the entirety of the last four years now, is something possibly even worse... worse because they should be smart enough to know better. That is:

A deliberate course of actions and social manipulations designed to elicit racist responses from the general public without seeming to be so themselves.

How different it was this side of the pond. After years of rationing, rationing was taken off the final products in 1953. Oh the joy of being taken down to the sweet shop by my big brother, and being able to choose my own sweets without Mum having to hand over a precious ration coupon.

And we had fun places to play, OK the grown ups called them bomb sites and said we should stay off them, but all the rubble was intriguing to kids, as were the municipal bomb shelters when people had broken the door locks, scary places to play hide and seek in, but kids like scary sometimes.

My dad remember the massive amounts of discarded and spent ammo and other remnants of the war littering the woods he played in as a child.

But heck, I still found steel helmets rusting away there in the 80s. We had saw blades ruined hitting shrapnel when cutting wood and digging in the garden now and then uncovered unspent cartridges.

I grew up in the 70's and I remember doing duck n cover drills when I first started going to school. I don't remember doing them past the 3rd grade... about the same time we stopped saying the pledge before class. Not sure if duck n cover drills were common all over at that time but i know we did them early on. But then in our school system, I was in 12th grade before we had a history book that went past WWII. I graduated in 91 lol.

The fifties was a time of political confusion, some of which still lingers. It was a time when child actors or actresses were on black lists, "politically unreliable" the usual excuse. Drunken Joe McCarthy literally tore the country into factions, none of which were real at the time, but sadly now exist. Allen West and his "infiltration by communists" has nothing new, and it's no more correct today than it was when Drunken Joe was on his reign of terror and destruction.

It was a time when you might be listening to the early rockers, Elvis, The Platters, a host of others, by day, and Mitch Miller or Laurence Welk on TV at night. Musically, a time of change, but the requirement for some excellence still required. A gimmick didn't get vary far, without some musicality, figure you were going to zero out, contrasted to today when any musicality will zero you out.

Arthur Godfrey was mentioned, but what was not, Godfrey was a tyrant where the show was concerned. None of his regulars were represented by agents, if they tried, it was their last appearance on his show. They were informed they were leaving on his program, live. Tenor Mario Lanza was one of them, one of the greatest voices of the time.

It was a time when you could buy a well used car for fifteen or twenty bucks, maybe twenty years old, and one hundred thousand miles was almost unheard of even for one that old. A "T-Bone" or "T-Bucket" was "cool", a "Deuce" or "A-banger" just as cool. I can remember filling Dads car at nineteen cents per gallon, or $0.189, which was during gas wars. and they were frequent. Cigarettes, Lucky Strike for 25 cents per pack, and two pennies under the wrapping out of a machine, 23 cents from anywhere else. Candy bars came in two sizes, five and ten cents.

Underage beer parties, someone would somehow get a half barrel, disappear with buddies and girlfriends, wouldn't be seen until the next morning, usually in the bathroom trying to , well, that would be pretty graphic. The parties weren't just winked at, if they were discovered, it usually meant the night in the juvie and your parents would be called, then you caught hell.

Longer, graceful skirts, the gentle swing as the girls walked, down almost to the ankles. At least until they were out of sight of their parents, then the waistbands were rolled and the skirts came halfway to the knee. Boys blue jeans tapered far more, and it was "cool" for the cuff to be just above the ankle.

Gym shoes rarely seen outside of the gym, loafers more common. Spit shine for some styles, and the "blue suede shoe" wasn't as common or wanted as much as one might think. Solid colored shirts, good slacks, and a white sports coat, either to a dance, usually sponsored by the high school or some other community organization, chaperoned well. String ties, almost always a tie of some kind nearly required.

Slide rules, almost a necessity, three ring binders were made to last years, even in school use. Learning the prelude to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the old English, and reciting from memory in class, as well as a host of other things that now mystify as much as they did then.

My brother and I spending the summer months pulling on a two man crosscut saw, fell a tree, cut it into firewood lengths, load on a trailer and when it was home, split into firewood. No big deal, unless we wanted to be cold all winter. But there was too much work that had to be done to be thinking about getting in trouble.

It wasn't so bad. It wasn't even difficult. By the time I reached eighteen, I was already looking for the trade I'd make my living at. It didn't always work like we wanted, I changed my mind before I was nineteen. Now, I know it was for the better.

The Fifties: A time when "crash-proofing" your car meant you had a heavier bigger chromed bumper than the other guy and still they might not survive the 5mph test.

A time when babies and young children were routinely "put to bed" on the back ledge under the back window of the chrome bumpered tank that your parents drove on a long trip. When stress testing bumpers, the children made excellent missles right into the windshield.

A time when there were gasoline stations on every corner. Many of which had been there since the 20's with a rusting underground steel tank just as old, that was leaking leaded hydrocarbons into the local soil.

A time when everybody had either a wood or coal or oil furnace. Natural gas was still years in the future. The valley towns (and most towns are in valleys) lay in a bowl of smog all winter long.

A time when TV's all had vacuum tubes which needed to be checked and/or replaced about twice a year. You became very familiar with the face of your TV repairman.

A time when AM radios were omnipresent. Big blocky things about the size of a breadbox and made of bakelite the wonder plastic that was still in use from the 20s. The 60's eventually saw many different types of new plastics. FM radio was like HDTV 5 years ago, available but not common.

A time when "garbage disposal" meant putting food scraps and other household debris into paper bags or cardboard boxes (no plastic you see) and carting them off to the local deep wooded valley outside of town and dumping it into the abyss mindful of the rats, snakes and bears that frequented the place. Great place to take a gun and practice shooting critters to hear them screech or old TV picture tubes to see what kind of noise an implosion makes. (Generally agreed to be "GNAB").

A time when the millions and millions of tires that were accumulating from the boom in the auto industry after WWII were simply gathered by enterprising people with trucks and carted away to great big huge piles that somehow would "accidentally" catch on fire so that more tires could be put on the same lot.

A time when businesses made money hand-over-fist because toxic waste products were routinely dumped into the local streams. Much like the poorer third-world countries today.

A time when every community had a hardware store that had what you needed and the clerk could tell you what you needed and you didn't need a map or bicycle to navigate the store.

A time when there were still old barns. Some a hundred years old with bats and "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" advertisements on them.

A time when Burma Shave sequential signs were all over the place.

A time when you could identify every type and year of every car on the road.

A time when the areas around steel mills were coated with red dust. I remember Lacawanna, NY (a suburb south of Buffalo) having red roads, red houses, red grass, red clothes drying on the lines and even at the age of 8, knowing that the people's lungs were rusty too.

Yes, that's right. No plastic. Children's toys were pretty much wood, or metal, or rubber, with cloth, or occasionally bisque components. Someone threw one at you, it could do damage. Fortunately most kids aren't strong enough to throw things really hard.

The Fifties: A time when "crash-proofing" your car meant you had a heavier bigger chromed bumper than the other guy and still they might not survive the 5mph test.

A time when babies and young children were routinely "put to bed" on the back ledge under the back window of the chrome bumpered tank that your parents drove on a long trip. When stress testing bumpers, the children made excellent missles right into the windshield.

A time when there were gasoline stations on every corner. Many of which had been there since the 20's with a rusting underground steel tank just as old, that was leaking leaded hydrocarbons into the local soil.

A time when everybody had either a wood or coal or oil furnace. Natural gas was still years in the future. The valley towns (and most towns are in valleys) lay in a bowl of smog all winter long.

A time when TV's all had vacuum tubes which needed to be checked and/or replaced about twice a year. You became very familiar with the face of your TV repairman.

A time when AM radios were omnipresent. Big blocky things about the size of a breadbox and made of bakelite the wonder plastic that was still in use from the 20s. The 60's eventually saw many different types of new plastics. FM radio was like HDTV 5 years ago, available but not common.

A time when "garbage disposal" meant putting food scraps and other household debris into paper bags or cardboard boxes (no plastic you see) and carting them off to the local deep wooded valley outside of town and dumping it into the abyss mindful of the rats, snakes and bears that frequented the place. Great place to take a gun and practice shooting critters to hear them screech or old TV picture tubes to see what kind of noise an implosion makes. (Generally agreed to be "GNAB").

A time when the millions and millions of tires that were accumulating from the boom in the auto industry after WWII were simply gathered by enterprising people with trucks and carted away to great big huge piles that somehow would "accidentally" catch on fire so that more tires could be put on the same lot.

Man that describes my childhood and I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I remember all this stuff growing up

OK...first time this thought occurred to be was one day when she and I were looking out at the front yard. It was spring, dandelions were sprouting all over the place... and she says, " Oh! The dandelions are just dreadful! I wish they never had banned DDT! That stuff actually worked. You didn't have all this mess all over your yard. I'll tell you, back then, you got your money's worth when you bought something. Things did what they were supposed to do!"

She was wrong in any case. DDT wouldn't have done a thing to those dandelions - it's an insecticide, not an herbicide.

Unlike the 1950s casual gals models sold here, it was a big no-no to let one's slip show. "Your slip is showing" was said scornfully to anyone who was walking around with even the bit of lace showing. Ammonia -reeking Toni home permanents designed to force straight hair into a helmet of proper hair-do are not missed. The 60's made straight hair fashionable YAY! Ditched the hideous cotton pointy bra and garter belts that school required for proper "foundations" and the oxford shoes, and the pointy glasses. None of this is missed at all! All kinds of authorities could tell you what to wear or not wear and how your hair should be coifed.

In grammar school we were shown a film called "The Sea Around Us" by Rachel Carson also of Silent Spring. It predicted global warming and melting of the ice packs, rising seas in low-situated populated areas.

What I really do not miss most of all is that everybody smoked everywhere. It was a sign of being an adult. Nicotine was still used as a highly effective insecticide. People knew that, soaked their butts in water and put it into the "Flit Gun". Now there's a 3d model to make!

The Flit Gun was a can with a screw top lid and nozzle and a long tube that had a pneumatic pump. Pump few times, and then a fine mist of poison could cover aphids or whatever. Green arsenic was also used for gardening and wood preservation. The Flit gun was a fixture at most homes. It had a very distinctive sound.

OK...first time this thought occurred to be was one day when she and I were looking out at the front yard. It was spring, dandelions were sprouting all over the place... and she says, " Oh! The dandelions are just dreadful! I wish they never had banned DDT! That stuff actually worked. You didn't have all this mess all over your yard. I'll tell you, back then, you got your money's worth when you bought something. Things did what they were supposed to do!"

She was wrong in any case. DDT wouldn't have done a thing to those dandelions - it's an insecticide, not an herbicide.

Use Agent Orange on the dandelions, that's a good herbicide

Wow... Agent orange...

I actually have a (semi) personal story about Agent Orange... My Uncle (who had been in Viet Nam) and my Aunt had a baby when I was like 7 yrs old. She seemed perfectly normal when she was a baby, but as she grew up, it was discovered that she had some unknown nerve defect that was slowly crippling her. Apparently, it was determined that it's cause was the Agent Orange my uncle had been exposed to... no cure... she will suffer until this kills her.

Unlike the 1950s casual gals models sold here, it was a big no-no to let one's slip show. "Your slip is showing" was said scornfully to anyone who was walking around with even the bit of lace showing. Ammonia -reeking Toni home permanents designed to force straight hair into a helmet of proper hair-do are not missed. The 60's made straight hair fashionable YAY! Ditched the hideous cotton pointy bra and garter belts that school required for proper "foundations" and the oxford shoes, and the pointy glasses. None of this is missed at all! All kinds of authorities could tell you what to wear or not wear and how your hair should be coifed.

In grammar school we were shown a film called "The Sea Around Us" by Rachel Carson also of Silent Spring. It predicted global warming and melting of the ice packs, rising seas in low-situated populated areas.

What I really do not miss most of all is that everybody smoked everywhere. It was a sign of being an adult. Nicotine was still used as a highly effective insecticide. People knew that, soaked their butts in water and put it into the "Flit Gun". Now there's a 3d model to make!

The Flit Gun was a can with a screw top lid and nozzle and a long tube that had a pneumatic pump. Pump few times, and then a fine mist of poison could cover aphids or whatever. Green arsenic was also used for gardening and wood preservation. The Flit gun was a fixture at most homes. It had a very distinctive sound.

.

My Da used to say "There's snow on the mountains" instead of "Your slip is showing."

And flit guns! :) I loved flit guns - my grandmother used to have a couple and any pesky insect needed to "Beware" when she had one of them in her hands.

Oh you all reminded me we did have a less rude way about hanging slips, "It's snowing down south", LOL!

Isn't it weird the precoccupation on both sides of the Atlantic with the propriety of a bit of hidden cloth?

Here I have attempted to recreate a flit gun -warning not historically accurate! Also my modeling skills are sketchy, and I could not get the Flit! Label to mask correctly on the can. I think the sound of the areosoled mist was kind of like flit-flit with each pump. An old advertisement would go "Hen-rrry! Get the Filt Gun!".

As for fly paper, oh yes, the "green" way back then. That is still available in the little rolls. Ack! I'm not up for modelling that!

>Isn’t it weird the precoccupation on both sides of the Atlantic with the propriety of a bit of hidden cloth?<</p>

Gives a bit of additional context to early Madona with her wearing of underwear as outerwear. Essentially, there was all of this various specialized underwear which was necessary for the overall "look" -- but heaven forfend that anyone should actually *see* it. Bra or slip straps being visible when wearing sleeveless tops was another mortifying no-no.

You are correct Lordvicore
I was born at the end of the 50's- there were still a few giant Ants and Tarantulas left in the 60's/ Luckily, the MEN in BLACk did away with most of them. I wonder if a few survived in remote areas.
In the late 70's everyone was focused on Stayin' Alive!

Let us not forget the giant prehistoric reptiles, tarantulas, ants and other assorted giant fire breathing radioactive mutant creatures that plagued our major cities back then. Those were crazy times... not really as crazy as the 70s with all that Boogie Fever killing everyone, or the 80s with... whatever it was that caused people to dress that way back then, but yeah, the 50s were rough.